EcoCradle: in the future our gadgets will come packaged in mushrooms

Whenever an electronic device gets shipped it will contain a varying degree of protective packaging. By far the most common form of this packaging is Styrofoam due to its ability to protect an object from bumps and falls while being very light and easily molded. The major problem with Styrofoam is that it requires petrol to create, and while we only use pieces of it for a few weeks at most its lifetime is counted in thousands of years.

Eben Bayer has appeared as a TED speaker showing us there is an alternative to Styrofoam that does exactly the same job, but will easily compost in your back yard after use.

The new protective material is called EcoCradle and uses Mycelium which comes from mushrooms. Mycelium is a growing organism when given fuel to do so, and forms as interwoven fibers which can be shape-controlled by placing them in a mold. The fuel used to allow the mycelium to grow is natural waste products such as seed husks. The end result is packaging that uses waste materials and is itself biodegradable.

While this may be the first time you have heard about EcoCradle it is already in use by a few manufacturers. It can be moulded into any required shape and takes around 5 days to grow. After that it just replaces that piece of Styrofoam in the box and the end user can throw it in their garden after use where it will quickly degrade.

When Styrofoam was first invented it was a fantastic new packaging product and has ensured millions of products reach our homes in perfect working order. This is especially true of monitors when CRT displays were our only option.

Now we realize the impact such materials have on our environment and an alternative needs to be found. EcoCradle sounds perfect because not only is it biodegradeable, it uses waste products from other industries when being formed. Because of that it forms a dual purpose of dealing with waste while creating no waste itself.

The difficulty now is going mass-market with EcoCradle. Jumping from a few manufacturers to replacing Styrofoam on the market is going to take a lot of investment and large facilities setup around the world. The good news is that process has at least started and now it should be only a matter of time before it becomes an easy alternative.